


Hatching Out

by Anonymous



Category: Children of Time Series - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Genre: Crows, Gen, Terraforming, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-26
Updated: 2021-03-26
Packaged: 2021-03-27 21:07:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30128850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: A wholly unexpected collision between a corvid genome and an alien molecular catalyst.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2
Collections: Worldbuilding Exchange 2021





	Hatching Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ExtraPenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/gifts).



The crow -- call her Morrigan, for that perhaps gives some sense of her True Name, the one she chose for herself at her second hatching, many years ago now -- hopped from one foot to another as she watched the ascent.

Most of the rest of the academic flock had taken to the air, to accompany the capsule as high as their wings would let them, albeit at a safe distance away from the intense maser beam, the design of the emitter matrix far below on the ground her own crucial contribution to the project. Perhaps it was a fuller understanding of the scale of the power output that lay behind Morrigan's choice to watch from a distance, remaining here in the great tree. Here, where they had roosted at night and worked by day as the preparations were made, all through the long summer. Its leaves were starting to yellow, now, and soon they would all head back to their ancestral nesting grounds in the equatorial forests.

Whether they did so in glory or ignominy, however, rested entirely on the next few hours. Each individual part of the idea was perfectly natural to her people, but the combination of them straddled the comical and the horrifying: an enormous egg floating upwards, beyond the sky, borne aloft on wings that could catch not the rising air current of a thermal but a newly-discovered form of invisible light, and carrying inside it not hatchlings but the very cream of their people, those who had emerged from their stone shells as the most disciplined, the most organised, the most curious: now a small intrepid flock, isolated as no flock ever had been before.

They were too high now for even the best fliers accompanying them to stay aloft, but as the rest of her flock returned, Morrigan's attention never wavered from the capsule itself. In an earlier phase of her life, she had watched as so many of her own fledglings had left the nest, but she had never felt this way about it: she had wondered if there was something wrong with her, since she didn't feel the anxiety the stories said she should about her children's fates. But each time, she had been confident each time that their second hatching had come good, that they would not just be able to make their way in the world, but make their mark on it.

She still remembered her own change: the point at which she had dedicated herself to science. She had felt it coming, the way her feathers had begun to harden, the way the ever-changing currents in her mind had begun to feel less like the whispers of the wind on a heedless pleasure flight, and more like determined wing beats. She had entered the metamorphosis a six-season fledgling, full of potential. She had left it a scientist.

It had been inevitable really: her father had always been fascinated with the great new discoveries coming out of the north-eastern flocks; his versions, she had learned later, were distorted, full of half-truths and misunderstandings. But still they had attracted her, jewels of knowledge shining brightly in her mind. The idea that she could seek out such jewels for herself, _make_ them herself, was irresistible. In the strange waking dream of the stone shell time, it was as though she had been able to comprehend her whole self, redirect the way her skills and talents had already developed towards this new goal, and increase the potential for developing them further. One of the enduring mysteries of their world was that no other creatures on the planet, as far as anyone knew, seemed to go through such a stage in their life-cycle. This was widely held to be proof that no other species was truly sentient, though the strange looks one sometimes got from certain small mammals had long given people pause on that front. Since the development of microscopy, however, the discovery that of all the species, only the corvids had stilpnosomes -- the special organelles that squirmed away inside every cell and which seemed to be intimately linked to the metamorphosis process -- had reinforced the idea that they were a breed apart. Every hatchling these days learned that these structures were the seat of the soul, though as far as Morrigan knew no one had ever actually produced proof.

All the others working on the project had made a similar dedication to exploration and discovery in their own metamorphosis, the choices they had made leading them inexorably here, years later. They had arrived back now, and stood with Morrigan for some time as the capsule continued to slowly rise. Slowly, though, the gathering broke up, most returning to their preferred branches for roosting, while those who would monitor the song from the capsule returning to their equipment: another application of invisible light. Even though she understood the theory very well, Morrigan found it astonishing that by the simple expediency of being sung at a different pitch, the subtle song from the capsule could evade being drowned out by the beam being sent skyward.

In the gathering dusk, the capsule grew smaller and smaller in her vision, until it suddenly reflected a single beam of sunlight, shimmering iridescently for just a moment. It was so far away now, so small, that her knowledge of the scales involved wavered in her mind, the atavistic instinct attracted to anything glistening taking over and leading her to imagine for a moment swooping away to grab it in her beak.

The moment passed, but by the time her sense of distance had reasserted itself, the capsule was gone from sight.

* * *

Odin hopped up onto the branch next to her as she was preening the deepest recesses of her left wing. He had never been one to respect privacy. Perhaps it was his nosiness, as much as his undoubted twin talents in singing and signalling, that led him to be in charge of the communications team.

"Do you want to hear what they've found?"

"You clearly want to tell me," Morrigan allowed, hopping away and then back towards him, as though they were courting.

They were both far too old to take an interest in such things, but Odin played into it, ruffling his feathers before saying, "The small-shiny-moon is a capsule."

Morrigan was stunned. The small-shiny-moon had been the obvious target for their mission all along, only a fraction of the world's radius above the sky. "What can you mean?" Her mind raced: were the distant southern flocks far more advanced than anyone had ever realised, and had long since made their way into the void?

"It has been there for ... we don't know how long, but a very long time."

And Odin told her everything they had pieced together so far.

The small-shiny-moon, that they would all have to learn to think of as something _artificial_ , rather than simply a part of the structure of the universe, had creatures inside. Strange creatures like nothing that had ever been seen before, not remotely corvid, nor like any other life-form known in the world. The closest analogue seemed to be the mammals, but these were far larger than the shrews and voles that scratched out an existence in the bases of the forests.

The strange creatures had come here -- they had _flown_ , farther and longer than any member of their species had ever dreamed of, through the sky beyond the sky. It had been a migration, but more than that, for they had sought not just to find new habitats, but to _make_ them. And although the records were fragmentary, and the systems they were stored on wholly unfamiliar, one thing was clear: this great migration had failed. Ultimately, they had come here only to die. The inhabitants of the spacecraft lay decaying in frozen coffins -- eggs within a nest that had turned against them, or, perhaps, fledglings whose metamorphoses had failed.

Odin told her with no little delight that the idea that _wingless_ creatures had somehow flown between the stars had already set the philosophical flocks into disarray. Some of the great thinkers were descending on the new ideas this represented as though they were the juiciest worms emerging from the ground after a spring rain. Others had taken metaphorical flight, seeking any alternative explanation, however unlikely or absurd. Already, Odin had learned when monitoring some of the more disreputable channels, rumours were circulating that these creatures were avians who had for some unknowable reason chosen -- or been forced -- to rid themselves of their wings, the strange misshapen plates of bone on their dorsal side the stubs that remained. Morrigan was attracted to this idea for a moment herself, but Odin informed her that the very density of that bone spoke against the unlikelihood of any avian lineage, however remote, unless the gravitational and atmospheric conditions of the creatures' planet of origin were wildly different to their own world.

"Do they have stilpnosomes?" Morrigan asked.

"We sent equipment for geological assay," Odin said, "not biological sampling."

"That includes microscopes, though, doesn't it?"

"They're working on it now, but the early indications are negative."

That discovery alone raised so many questions. "We'll need follow up missions," Morrigan said. "Now that we know what we're really dealing with ... This will keep us busy for years. Generations."

* * *

The planet spun on its axis, day succeeding night succeeding day, as it turned along its orbit, season progressing to season and year to year.

Corvid society was overturned repeatedly by new discoveries arising from that first, monumental one: that they were not alone, that they had, in however haphazard and unlikely a way, been _created_. It was as though the discovery was an enormous patch of warm ground, above which intellectual and political ideas soared on thermals, swooping over the landscape of all that had gone before and re-interpreting it. The diversity of second hatchings grew as never before, individuals dedicating themselves to ways of life that had never been imagined possible in previous generations. Some emerged from their stone shells to become eccentric recluses, others charismatic leaders, while others retreated into the past, deliberately fitting themselves for the lifestyles of their forebears. Large sections of the sparsely populated western continent were soon occupied by self-selected flocks of these, ready to angrily defend their territory at the slightest provocation, even though precious few others were interested in it anyway.

And as all of this went on, a song that the corvids did not even know they had broadcast raced away across the void. The satellite's automated systems, on being brought back to life by the corvid explorers, had attempted in their naive way to broadcast the news of their re-awakening to Earth. Earth had long since been abandoned, a toxic ruin.

But over such interstellar distances, even the highly directional antenna of the satellite could not prevent the radio waves spreading out, to encompass not just Earth but the other worlds of its strange, stop-start diaspora. And while Earth remained forever silent, elsewhere the signals were received with keen interest, greeted by gasps of surprise, flicks of tentacles, dipped antennae, and twitching palps.

* * *

Badb fluttered nervously in the highest branches of the tree. She knew full well that it was the same tree from which her distant ancestor Morrigan had watched the ascent of the first space capsule. She had been fed the family stories in the nest, the intellectual nourishment far more important than worms and insects as far as her parents were concerned. They had been fed them in turn by her grandparents, and so on for many generations before.

Partly, the tree had been chosen for the same practical reasons that it had been used for that first spaceflight -- despite new discoveries in the most remote areas of the southern continents, it remained one of the tallest in the world -- but the symbolism was not lost on Badb, or any of the others gathered with her.

On that day, they had flown out into a far bigger sky than they had ever known before. Today, their people would finally join a wider flock than even the "humans" whose corpses they had found in that sky had ever dreamed of creating.

Humans were coming -- live ones -- but not _just_ humans. On other worlds, some of the same strange processes that had created their world had brought forward others elsewhere: sentient spiders, and two different types of strange aquatic creatures who as far as Badb knew had no direct analogue on her world. Now they had formed a strange alliance, a flock which her people might now join.

There had been radio contact for years now. It had been decades before they'd received the reply they had never expected, to a signal they had never known they'd sent. But as the ship that had already been on its way when that first reply was received grew closer, much faster communication had become possible. At first it had been with the ship's guiding intelligence, which called itself a human name that almost sounded like a corvid call -- "Avrana Kern" -- but seemed to be something far stranger still. In the last season or two, as the occupants of the ship had woken from hibernation, they had joined the conversation too. There had been some cultural delicacies around the fact that the omnivorous corvid diet included the Portiids' extremely distant cousins, but these had, it seemed, been smoothed over.

And in all those ongoing discussions, the story of the world which the corvids had never needed a name for, but which the humans had begun to call Parliament, had become a little clearer, though at the same time new mysteries to explore had been revealed.

Kern had helped them decipher more of the satellite's data archive in a few short years than had been achieved by generations of corvid scientists before that. They had learned of the original human expedition, its successes and failures, and most of all how different Parliament had once been.

The expedition had found a world that seemed to mimic the way they conjectured Earth had been billions of years previously: single-celled photosynthetic organisms gathered into huge structures, quietly pumping oxygen out into the atmosphere. Excited, they had considered this fertile ground for overlaying their own ecological techniques. They had launched the automated terraforming equipment, equipped with its evolution-accelerating "Rus-Califi virus", and returned to hibernation.

They could have had no way of knowing that the planet already had its own ways of accelerating growth: a catalyst that acted on self-replicating molecules in ways that Kern and her passengers found incomprehensible, but to the corvids were a natural part of the rhythm of life. The deceptively simple molecule somehow accessed the full set of probabilities for that self-replication and played out all possibilities simultaneously, before resolving into a particular form.

The seemingly primordial world that the human expedition had found was, it seemed, only a particular strange attractor in the phase space available to the early replicating molecules that had arisen on Parliament. But the genetic material the human expedition had launched into the seas had given the catalyst something far, far different to work with.

And so had begun the great change. The satellites' sensors had recorded it all, seeing everything but understanding nothing.

The whole world had, in essence, entered its own stone shell, before hatching out again completely different. Corvid society had any number of creation myths, but the truth turned out to mirror their own life cycle more closely than any of the stories.

The corvids had always been tool users; even their distant ancestors on Old Earth had been known for that. The catalyst molecule was a tool like no other, a tool that only needed the possibility of use to be effective. Those sections of the corvid genome which coded for that type of intelligence, alongside the presence of the Rus-Califi virus, had created a new set of possibilities, and when acted upon by the catalyst, the world had been remade into a corvid paradise. The other genomes present in the terraforming samples had all been put to good use, creating trees to roost in and plants and animals that were good to eat. The catalyst itself had become locked into corvid cells -- and _only_ corvid cells -- as the stilpnosome. That exclusivity spoke perhaps to something less admirable in the corvid genome, a possessive avariciousness that, too, could be traced back to the birds of Old Earth. And there, it had worked its magic on a smaller scale for each individual, allowing them to play out the possibilities of _themselves_ , a wilful redirection of their own genome to create a new self: the brief time in the stone shell allowing the catalyst to work, before the second hatching.

Badb knew that some of their visitors -- arriving so soon now -- were nervous of the implications, even though the corvids had assured that it didn't affect any other species to their knowledge. Others, on the other hand, wanted to explore the phenomenon and see if it could be applied elsewhere. Kern herself was already talking excitedly of the possibilities of integrating what she referred to as a "biological quantum computer" into her own systems.

The history the visitors had told the corvids was one of change and adaptation. Messy, complicated, often proceeding indirectly and by fits and starts. But change and adaptation was what the corvids were so good at. Badb was confident that they could help each other.

"There," someone next to her called, gesturing with a wing tip.

The spaceship -- or rather, the small sub-part of it designed for atmospheric entry -- was a glimmer of light on the horizon. Badb knew that it was still impossibly far away.

Nevertheless, she leapt out of the tree to fly towards it.


End file.
